Robert Thompson Television Quotations

How television and the culture are absorbing Katrina is certainly different than how they absorbed Sept. 11. Four years ago, all culture was put on pause. But people have continued to watch comedies and dramas and reality shows throughout, even when things were at their grimmest.

For all the enormous social and cultural upheaval and change and revolution which we've all come to know as cliched definitions of the '60s, prime-time television in this country managed to almost completely ignore it,

Since these competitions can also lend themselves to television broadcasts, there is no reason to believe that we may not see more organized competitions in the future, ... If television can figure out how to make playing cards interesting, it should certainly be able to do so with video games.

Sometimes a performance is best experienced with other people. The real advantage of television - that theater and the movies don't have - is you're allowed to talk through it.

For most of the '60s, television was trying to hold the dyke. All of these changes and pressures built up throughout the 1960s and finally burst in January of 1971.

This came out as the center of the universe for the demographic of young people and it managed to bring together people who would have been very disparate in what radio stations they listened to. But they all came together in this one television hangout.

It's the only television entity of any kind that ever had a generation named after it,

I think we have yet to realize how much we are going to miss that. I don't think it's a total coincidence that it's happening at the same time there's an increasingly divisive nature in the country. What the consensus medium of television used to do, and radio before that, was to provide this enormous center that everybody had to go to now and then. ... Now, there is a lack of cultural consensus that even extends to what we consider the body of facts we used to debate.

The only difference is that television is such a predominant medium. ... Radio used to have sitcoms and doctor shows and cop shows and game shows and all the different genres, and television wrestled that primary entertainment away from it. But I think in terms of its impact on the medium of radio, yes, this is going to be a very big deal.

These are old procedural dramas dolled up for the new century, ... 'CSI' is the new 'Quincy, M.E.' Bruckheimer is good at using old-fashioned television storytelling techniques in the era of 'Lost.'

Reality has taken a major hit. But it's far from dead, and some form of this stuff is going to be on television for at least the next century, if not longer.

Nobody had that expectation before. Television was something you had absolutely no control over.